Tear it Down
2006 marks the anniversary of the Interstate Highway System. While many of us have come to take the highway system for granted, it’s good to remember how controversial the building of this system was. Many neighborhoods, often lower-income and minority ones, were displaced, if not destroyed entirely, by roads that cut right through the heart of so many cities. While Lewis Mumford’s prediction that interstate highways would create “a tomb of concrete roads and ramps covering the dead corpse of the city” perhaps was a bit overstated, many agree that the highway system facilitated white flight and the development of suburbia and urban sprawl.
As highways reach the end of their natural lives — or succumb to natural disasters, as was the case in San Francisco — the country is now being given a second chance to decide if the highway infrastructure it has is actually what it wants. Over the last two decades, New York City, Portland, San Francisco and Milwaukee have all chosen to tear down their elevated urban highways and replace them with boulevards, newly reconfigured to reconnect back to the urban grid. And today, cities like Baltimore, Buffalo, Akron, New Orleans, Miami, Cleveland, Rochester, Louisville and the Bronx are all considering doing the same.
CNT wants to make sure that these cities make well-informed choices. With the Congress for the New Urbanism CNU, CNT is assessing the economic and environmental benefits of replacing superhighways and high-speed arterials with lower-speed, at-grade streets. We plan to use our findings to impact the public debate about what constitutes good urban development and influence decision-makers to make the choices that best serve the environmental and economic interests of people in communities.
Brown, Higgins, Urban Design Group Want to Tear Down Skyway
March 23, 2006, 08:12 PM
WIVB.com, Channel 4
Buffalo, NY, March 23, 2006 – - The day may finally come when they say “The Skyway is falling!” Senior Correspondent Rich Newberg has more on a new push to pull the aging waterfront structure down and out of the way.
Buffalo Congressman Brian Higgins said, “You got $22 million into it, just in repairs for this year.”
Higgins is hoping former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist will help speed up efforts to bring the Skyway down.
He’s the expert.
Norquist said, “You don’t put something that is ugly and just has a utility purpose, like this, right next to the water. You could have hundreds of millions of dollars of development.”
John Norquist knows something about taking down old elevated highways and bridges.
In Milwaukee, he took down something similar to our Skyway, clearing the way for $300 million of new development.
The Skyway, he says, is blocking Buffalo’s waterfront development.
Norquist said, “Tear it down. I mean, it’s blighting property.”
Norquist heads up a group that helps bring old cities back up to speed, called the Congress for New Urbanism.
He has chosen Buffalo as a national demonstration city, and has the support of the mayor, who also wants to see the Skyway come down.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said, “As a way of returning viability, prosperity, and creating economic and housing development in the City of Buffalo.”
For those who might find it hard to visualize a waterfront without the Skyway, we took the liberty of altering the present landscape a little bit. See images at left.
Norquist said, “Right away, you’ll see property values rise. … It will happen here. But you have to let it happen.”
Those who want the Skyway taken down hope the state won’t put up a roadblock.
As Higgins pointed out, it’s costing millions right now to keep it up.
